Political blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, in Berkeley, Calif. on 3/17/06, posts the most popular blog (www.dailykos.com) in the nation and has just come out with a book.
PAUL CHINN/The ChronicleRan on: 04-05-2006
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, creator of the popular dailykos.com, says he wrote his book because, &quo;The permanence of the blog is not one of its strong suits.&quo;Ran on: 04-05-2006
Ran on: 04-05-2006
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, creator of the popular dailykos.com, says he wrote his book because, &quo;The permanence of the blog is not one of its strong suits.&quo;
Ran on: 07-29-2007
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga started the liberal Daily Kos blog, which now attracts about 500,000 visitors a day.
Ran on: 07-29-2007
Markos Moulitsas Z�niga started the liberal Daily Kos blog, which now attracts about 500,000 visitors a day.

The second annual gathering of the Daily Kos political blog starts this week in Chicago, and here's all you need to know about how influential the YearlyKos convention has become: Five top presidential candidates are going -- including front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, even though the Kos bloggers don't like her that much.

Analysts say the community of liberal online activists -- the "netroots" -- has become not only a coveted constituency for the left but a legitimate threat to conservatives, who trail Democrats in online campaigning and fundraising.

Another sign of the growing power of the Daily Kos convention is that none of the attending Democratic hopefuls -- including Sens. Barack Obama and Chris Dodd, former Sen. John Edwards and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson -- are scheduled to appear at the Democratic Leadership Council gathering this weekend in Tennessee. The DLC is the moderate organization that former President Bill Clinton led for two years before beginning his successful campaign for the White House in 1992.

"It's hilarious that (Hillary Clinton's) not even attending her own group," said Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the Berkeley resident who founded Daily Kos in 2002, and whose nickname, "Kos," supplies the moniker for the blog where 500,000 regularly visit.

Most liberal bloggers detest Clinton for her 2002 vote authorizing President Bush to pursue military action in Iraq. In Daily Kos' monthly presidential straw polls, "No Freaking Clue" frequently has drawn more votes than Clinton.

Yet Clinton's relationship with liberal bloggers may be starting to thaw. This week, she sent her spokesman to defend the Kos bloggers against attacks made by Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly on JetBlue Airways, the convention's most prominent corporate sponsor. And in the latest Kos straw poll of more than 15,000 voters this week, Clinton edged "No Freaking Clue" -- by three percentage points.

While Democrats flock to Kos, conservatives have ramped up their attacks. Last week on "Fox News Sunday," Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative journal the Weekly Standard, described Moulitsas as "the left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago. Now the whole party is going to pay court to him and to left-wing blogs." Kristol predicted it would hurt the Democrats.

On Friday, the Republican National Committee sent reporters a set of YearlyKos talking points with a headline that read, "Democrat Candidates Plan Panderfest To 'Liberal Partisans' At YearlyKos Convention."

"These guys (the liberal political bloggers) have power now. They can change elections," said Michael Cornfield, adjunct professor in political management at George Washington University and author of "Politics Moves Online: Campaigning."

In last year's midterm elections, Cornfield pointed to how liberal online activists helped dump incumbent Republican senators in Virginia and Montana, and led the effort to defeat Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut (although he won election as an independent).

Clinton's campaign, Cornfield said, "made the judgment that they can't get the nomination as long as the netroots oppose them. They don't want them to hate her; they just want detente with them."

The netroots have come a long way from the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was big news that bloggers were given media credentials.

On paper, the four-day convention that opens Thursday resembles any other convocation of 1,400 like-minded people, albeit one that is likely to be obsessively blogged by 200 journalists. Run by a nearly all-volunteer staff, with many of its leaders living in the Bay Area, its schedule is full of seminars with titles like "Blog Foreign Policy and Networked Public Diplomacy."

Though Moulitsas is a consultant to the convention, YearlyKos is a separate operation from his blog at www.dailykos.com.

It is sponsored by liberal hubs like Moveon.org and People for the American Way, labor groups, Democratic Party-related groups and liberal media outfits.

Some campaigns will be throwing evening parties for the guests, hoping to curry favor.

Though a few blogs and online communities have invited members to gather in person over the years, nothing in the online political world resembles the size and star power that Kos is attracting.

On the conservative side, A-list speakers assemble at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) -- where Ann Coulter referred to former Sen. John Edwards with an anti-gay slur earlier this year. But CPAC doesn't have an online community.

And conservatives don't have anything quite like the Daily Kos blog, either. There are highly popular conservative blogs, like MichelleMalkin.com and Instapundit.com. But analysts say the Daily Kos functions more like a community, where liberal smack-talk, tips and strategy are traded and underreported stories are tipped.

"Conservative bloggers tend to think of themselves more as pundits," said Robert Bluey, director of the Center for Media & Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Indeed, Moulitsas said, when he went on vacation for a few weeks earlier this summer, "Our traffic didn't go down at all." Same goes with the YearlyKos convention, he said.

Most of the partisan political blogs that attract more than 1 million page views a week tend to be liberal, said Justin Abbott, vice president of Blogads, which places advertising on liberal and conservative blogs.

"Maybe it is because conservatives are still plugged into talk radio, and a lot are still using it as their primary source of news," said Bluey. Led by right-wing talkers like Rush Limbaugh, conservatives have dominated radio for two decades.

Political scientist Cornfield and others say the edge that Democratic presidential hopefuls are showing so far over their GOP counterparts is more about voter dissatisfaction with President Bush, as well as the strength of their own campaigns. The Obama campaign has not only raised $58.4 million in the first six months of this year -- more than any other candidate -- but it has harvested 258,000 donors largely through its various online efforts. No other primary candidate has more than 100,000 donors.

Bluey sees a connection between highly trafficked political blogs and online fundraising, though. "When people get excited about something they read and contribute to on a blog, they're probably more likely to want to give money to a candidate," he said.

Other conservatives say the rise of YearlyKos and the netroots could ultimately be good for Republicans. It shows how the Democrats are leaning left, said Kristinn Taylor, a spokesman for the right-leaning Web site FreeRepublic.com. And he's happy about that, "because anything that drives them over a cliff is good news."

"It reminds me of 1972, when the left wing of the (Democratic) party took over," Taylor said, referring to former President Richard Nixon's landslide victory over Democratic Sen. George McGovern. The influence of the netroots "show that they've taken over the party now. And that's bad for the country, because we (conservatives) view the war in Iraq as essential to the war on terror."

But as polls show that 70 percent of Americans want U.S. troops to leave Iraq, the liberal bloggers might be closer to the political center, at least on that issue.

The downside to this notoriety is that YearlyKos' visibility has made it a target for the right. Earlier this month on his Fox News show, O'Reilly pointed to some of the thousands of comments posted on Daily Kos, like "the pope is a primate," as evidence of "one of the worst examples of hatred America has to offer" and compared the blog's commentators to the Ku Klux Klan.

He then criticized the conference's lone corporate sponsor, JetBlue, for sponsoring the comments -- even though the airline doesn't sponsor the blog, which is where the comments appear; rather it offered 10 round-trip voucher tickets to the convention to give to speakers in exchange for placing the airline's logo on the convention Web site.

After five days of O'Reilly's bashing -- including one of his correspondents doing an ambush interview of JetBlue's CEO -- and the airline receiving several hundred negative e-mails, JetBlue asked YearlyKos sponsors to pull its logo from the convention's Web site.

While that may have quieted O'Reilly's supporters, it riled up the netroots who bombarded JetBlue for backing down.

"We are the only people in the world who united the left and the right," joked JetBlue spokeswoman Jenny Devlin, who noted that the 1,000 e-mails the airline has received are split roughly between partisans from the left and right. She regrets that "Mr. O'Reilly totally misrepresented and misinformed the public as to what we did."

It was a lesson in how the political blogosphere works, even for a company that cultivates a hip, irreverent image.

"We wanted to get JetBlue's logo in front of 1,400 really connected, influential people who know how to build a community in the online world," she said. "This wasn't about taking political sides. But we learned a lesson here. This is new territory for us. There are a lot of passionate people online."